super AIT (S-AIT)
S-AIT (Super AIT) is a concept in tape drives that represents a further development of AIT drives. The high storage capacity and performance is achieved by a tape drive technology that combines the advantages of the helical scan process with those of longer and wider magnetic tapes normally used in longitudinal tape drives. This combination allows the S-AIT technology to achieve storage capacities unmatched by any other 1/2" technology.
Accordingly, the 2003 S-AIT-1 drive has a storage capacity of 500 gigabytes( GB), compressed 1.3 terabytes( TB), and a data transfer rate of 30 MB/s for uncompressed and 78 MB/s for compressed data. The 2006 version S-AIT2 has 800 GB/2 TB and a data rate of 45 MB/s. The development of further versions has been discontinued. As a compression method, S-AIT drives use ADLC compression, which has a compression factor of 2.6:1.
The storage density is 90 megabytes (MB) per square inch, the Mean Time Between Failures( MTBF) is given as 500,000 hours for continuous operation and the error rate is below `10^-17`.
S-AIT magnetic tapes have a length of 600 m and are half an inch (1.26 cm) wide, they have AME coating and a cartridge memory( CM) on which the table of contents is stored.
S-AIT drives are equipped with an Ultra SCSI interface with Low Voltage Differential( LVD) and Fibre Channel.